The madness rolled through an anonymous breakfast bar in Arlington, just outside Dallas, soon after six o’clock on Tuesday morning. Sleepy diners gazed at a bank of television screens which had lit up with images of two contrasting men on the early morning NBC news. In front of them a suave anchorman promised that Friday night’s manufactured scrap in north Texas between “the 58-year-old boxing icon Iron Mike Tyson and the Problem Child, Jake Paul,” will transport us “back to the glory days of boxing”.
As if we needed any more convincing the screen then filled with the scraggly bearded face of Paul, “the 27-year-old YouTube sensation”, who praised the owners of the Dallas Cowboys for sharing his vision of staging “the biggest fight in the history of boxing” at their AT&T Stadium just 10 miles down the road from where we sat drinking our lukewarm coffee.
